Talk to me: towards a politics of transnational feminist solidarity

Abstract

The 2012 gangrape of a young woman in Delhi, known as the Nirbhaya case, became an international media event that cast public spaces in India as unsafe, and situated sexual violence as a problem characterized by class difference and lack of development. This dominant media discourse reiterated long-standing neocolonial, classist and casteist tropes that signified a failure of transnational solidarity. At this time, Talk to Me, a public art intervention by the Bangalore-based feminist artist collective, Blank Noise, went viral on social media. The project took place near the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology on a lane along which many women experience molestation and harassment. Students from Srishti engaged strangers – typically migrant and displaced men from the lower classes – in a conversation over tea and a snack. In this article, I analyse Talk to Me as an intervention that offered a counternarrative and countervisual to the dominant, fear-based characterization of public spaces in India. Talk to Me encouraged participants, through a process of dialogue and conversation, to identify and overcome their internalized biases about the lower-class, migrant men who are often constructed as sexual threats to upper-class women. These conversations, I argue, were designed to break down ingrained biases and internalized prejudice, and to attempt to create compassion and solidarity across the barriers of class, education, language, and gender. The intervention offers a model of building solidarity that is not passive or automatic, but rather requires the difficult and often uncomfortable labour of self-reflection and introspection.